In deciding if and what type of graduate degree I wanted, I went back and forth between a PhD and an MFA. I love writing about dance. I love dance theory and dance history, but I eventually decided that I wanted to get my MFA. The crux of my decision had to do with embodiment. I realized that embodiment of my art and the theory of my art was still very important to me.
Now, I don’t mean to imply that those with PhDs in dance are disembodied or that they don’t value embodiment. Because that is not the case. However, when I looked at the course loads for PhD programs and MFA programs—there were more opportunities for the practice and embodiment of the art in MFA programs. And so, here I am—an MFA candidate at the University of Utah.
Which brings me back to my original dilemma—where is the embodiment in the making of a screendance? Certainly, in the shooting stage of a dance video, the camera is apt to a partner, as is the person shooting the film. That part of the dance film is certainly embodied—especially by the cameraman. Unfortunately, though, the shoot takes much, much less time than the edit.
And the edit is where my main contention lies. In the last dance video I made, I spent about two hours shooting and then almost twelve hours editing. One night I even sat in my chair without getting up (literally!) for five hours. All for a two minute video dance.
I guess that’s where I’m having trouble. If I sit for almost twelve hours manipulating images on a screen, how am I furthering my goal of embodiment? I love making screendance, but am I selling out? Or is it that the goal of the screendance is to make the audience feel as if they have just embodied the dance screen? Or, to make the audience want to move?
What are your thoughts?
I love that you are addressing this topic.
ReplyDeleteFor me I also find that embodiment can be a struggle during the filming stage as well as the editing, causing me to question exactly what qualifies as a "Dance for Camera" and what is simply experimental film. In many D4C works that I have seen, I am not sure that I really feel like there is truly "dance" going on in the shoot. Although with time, patience, and coordination the dancer and cinematographer can find the kind of partnering you mention that will allow for full movement, many times I see the camera merely exploring or deconstructing the body. While this can be beautiful, to me it is not necessarily dance.
I think that this is a very important question than many who do not value or investigate the world through physical embodiment don't ask enough. Your question puts me in mind of the ideas John Berger points out in his book "Ways of Seeing." He talks about how the staging of art, how visual art is composed speaks to the preferences of the dominant (in our case the wealthy) class in a culture. So you take embodiment, physical bodily experience, something often grossly undervalued in our current society. Then you begin (most likely unconsciously) to manipulate that form of art into compositions that make it more adaptable and comparable to the cultural expectations of the dominant culture. And when you look at our culture you see technology, the screen (i.e. video, camera, television, etc.) and the visual arts as common themes found amongst our wealthy. Thank goodness for things like youtube that alter this hierarchy. But ultimately, because of our cultural values established long before screendance, the physical moving body must be co-opted into more "valuable" forms in order to be perceived as a "higher" or more valuable form of art.
ReplyDeleteSome examples of this co-opting of dance and the moving body are:
- We codify the steps and name each step as a way to bring organization to such an amorphous form.
- Concert dance ("Higher class" people observe/partonize dance, not participate in it.)
- We video record dance performance or make movies about dance as a way to make dance more accessible to all because we value having access at our fingertips to art forms and value the replicating its value as a commodity.
- We write critiques about dance because literature, analysis, and critique is something we highly value.
- We incorporate technology into the dance because technology is our future and inventions and applications produce wealth.
- We notate and document the form to lessen it's ephemeral nature because to freeze dance for the purposes of later replication or examination is a cultural (Cartesian) value.
Thanks for sharing this interesting quandary.